Stites, Chapter 7

Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society Since 1900
Richard Stites
Chapter 7: Perestroika and the People's Taste 1985-


Perestroika was a political movement within the USSR during the 1980s under Gorbachev, which was introduced known as glasnost, meaning "openness." It's literal meaning is "restructuring," referring to the restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system. 


This was marked by unprecedented freedom of expression and a legitimation by the authorities of spontaneously generated culture from below. The new popular culture that developed from this change contained strong currents of iconoclasm, demythologizing, and open irreverence. 


The "people's tastes" were on full display. 


Most remarkable for this course, the filmmakers' union was reorganized in 1986. This moved the movie world into a whirlpool of change. Filmmakers were finally free to place once taboo political, social, and sexual themes on screen.


A new version of a recurrent debate surfaced. Many critics continued to scorn commercially successful films and wished to sustain the distance between filmmaker and mass audience. Other's openly recognized the people's taste and made movies to address them. New popular kinds of films addressed problems of alienated you, sexual tension, and hooliganism. 


This new openness in film, and culture itself, helped to close a huge gap in Soviet life between the public and the private.